Increase Productivity with custom google chrome search engines

As a programmer, I spend a lot of my time searching through web-based software such as JIRA, Bitbucket, and Github.

On a day-to-day basis, I’ll be looking up tickets by their reference numbers. Why? Why can’t I just get these tickets off of the current sprint board? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ll be in the middle of a ticket, and a tester, business analyst, or product owner will drop me a message asking about XYZ-999.

What on earth was XYZ-999? I’ve managed to save a large amount of time by introducing custom search engines into google for simple tasks as quickly searching for a ticket reference.

Or even just looking up active pull requests or trying to find some documentation on confluence.

In this short article, I’ll share how I go about doing this so that you can save yourself some time, sure it’s 20-30 seconds here or there, but that adds up over a year.

Adding a custom search engine to Chrome

Open Chrome and right-click the address bar, and click Manage search engines...

Click the add button. Under the section other search engines, a small popup will show with 3 form fields to fill in.

Search Engine:
Keyword:
URL with %s in place of query

Fill this in with the info about your search engine. For example, confluence my be something like:

Search Engine: Wiki
Keyword: wiki
URL: https://<company>.atlassian.net/wiki/search?text=%s

How to use a custom search engine

Once you’ve added a custom search engine, you can use it by clicking on the address bar and using the keyword, followed by a space, then the text you want to search for, then press enter.

wiki which badger danced the best duck?<enter>

Examples from my uses

Search Engine: Jira
Keyword: jira
URL: https://<company>.atlassian.net/browse/ref-%s

Search Engine: BBPRs
Keyword: bbpr
URL: https://bitbucket.org/<company>/<repo>/pullrequests/%s

Search Engine: Gihub_ProjectPRs
Keyword: ghppr
https://github.com/<company>/<project>/pulls

Search Engine: Gihub_AllPRs
Keyword: ghapr
https://github.com/pulls

Wrap Up

This has been a very short post, but it is what it says on the tin, a very simple post showing you an easy tip to make searching GitHub, Jira, etc., much easier.